Yining Karl Li
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yiningkarlli.bsky.social
Yining Karl Li
@yiningkarlli.bsky.social
Rendering Engineer at Disney Animation working on Disney's Hyperion Renderer. Previously at Pixar, Dreamworks, Cornell, Penn. Views here are my own.

https://www.yiningkarlli.com
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@yiningkarlli
Shooting using Halide with Process Zero is so vastly better than the iPhone's overcooked default image processing that it's crazy. I've realized that the reason I haven't liked taking phone pics is mostly because of how wildly overboard phones go with image processing by default.
November 15, 2025 at 10:16 AM
Two more that I thought would be fun to crop to XPan-style 65:24 aspect ratio. Cropping down to 65:24 on an iPhone pic is sort of crazy, but I think the grain kind of works here.
November 15, 2025 at 10:01 AM
Your favorite hand-drawn 90s Disney Animation films? Brought to you in part by supercomputing tech meant for nuclear weapons R&D.

Which is still pretty much the same situation today; animation/VFX renderfarms remain to some extent spiritual cousins of DoE supercomputers. (3/3)
November 11, 2025 at 6:02 AM
Eventually years later the time came to decommission the Cray J90, which required representatives from the Federal Government to oversee holes being physically drilled into every CPU die for ITAR export ban reasons. (2/3)
November 11, 2025 at 6:02 AM
That's true; I'm not going to begrudge anyone who can find a way to waste Nvidia's money!
October 22, 2025 at 5:15 AM
If we assume a dual-layer design with single-sided radiators, then they need a 100 sq km array. Alternatively, you could have a two-sided radiator, but radiating heat directly into the back of your solar panels vastly decreases solar panel efficiency.
October 22, 2025 at 5:02 AM
Basic math shows the array is not large enough for a dual-layer design. Modern two-sided spacecraft radiators can dissipate about 100W per square meter. So for a 5 GW data center in space, you'd need 50 square km of two-sided radiators alone. Their video shows an array with an area of 16 sq km.
October 22, 2025 at 5:01 AM
Modern spacecraft radiators can dissipate about 100W per square meter. So for a 5 gigawatt data center in space, you'd need 50 square km of radiators alone. Their video shows a solar array with an area of 16 square km- where is all of the heat going???
October 22, 2025 at 5:00 AM
Did you see her music video for Taste from her previous album? It’s absolutely WTF but in the best way.
October 19, 2025 at 8:01 PM
As someone whose hobby projects are basically exclusively in software, I'm always really impressed by people who build awesome hobby projects in actual atoms, not just bits.
October 19, 2025 at 7:13 AM
For friends who don’t know baseball, a football (soccer) analogy:

Imagine if Messi did everything he already does but somehow he also simultaneously played both forward and goalkeeper in the same game and was elite at goalkeeper as well.
October 18, 2025 at 4:31 AM